Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

Robert M. Pirsig
Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth—but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

Robert M. Pirsig
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.

Robert M. Pirsig
If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

Robert M. Pirsig
Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.

Robert M. Pirsig
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

Robert M. Pirsig
Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.

Robert M. Pirsig
The Church welcomes technological progress and receives it with love, for it is an indubitable fact that technological progress comes from God and, therefore, can and must lead to Him.

Robert M. Pirsig
The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

Robert M. Pirsig
Time, then, and the heaven came into being at the same instant in order that, having been created together, if ever there was to be a dissolution of them, they might be dissolved together.

Robert M. Pirsig
Morality is not a simple set of rules. It's a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patters evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.

Robert M. Pirsig
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.

Robert M. Pirsig
Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum

Robert M. Pirsig
Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.

Robert M. Pirsig
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

Robert M. Pirsig
Time is creation. The future is just not there.

Robert M. Pirsig
Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

Robert M. Pirsig
New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.

Robert M. Pirsig
Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.

Robert M. Pirsig
Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.

Robert M. Pirsig
Time at first - in reality before that "first" was produced by desire of succession - Time lay, though not yet as Time, in the Authentic Existent together with the Cosmos itself; the Cosmos also was merged in the Authentic and motionless within it.

Robert M. Pirsig
If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane?

Robert M. Pirsig
"When are we going to get going?" Chris says. "What's your hurry?" I ask. "I just want to get going." "There's nothing up ahead that's any better than it is right here."

Robert M. Pirsig
Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It's a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn't called insane only because there are so many people involved.

Robert M. Pirsig
What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.

Robert M. Pirsig
Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention.

Robert M. Pirsig
The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.

Robert M. Pirsig
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

Robert M. Pirsig
An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or the other.

Robert M. Pirsig
Between the subject and the object lies the value. This Value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any 'self' or any 'object' to which it may be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.

Robert M. Pirsig